A month after the telegram, a parcel arrived. Lizzie brought it into the sitting room.

“There’s a note,” she said, taking it from under the string that held the brown-paper parcel together.

Dear Mrs. Owen,

Please accept these two copies of Women’s Words and Their Meanings, with my compliments. I apologise I could not print more, and that the binding is not to the standard of the original. Paper is in short supply, as you know. I have taken the liberty of retaining a third copy for the Oxford University Press library. If you ever need to access it, you will find it shelved alongside the Dictionary fascicles.

Yours, in sympathy,

Horace Hart

Lizzie stoked the coals then sat beside me. I released the bow and the paper fell away.

“It’s a good thing,” said Lizzie.

“What is?”

“Having copies.” She took one and turned the pages, counting them under her breath. She stopped on page fifteen and found her own name.

“Lizzie Lester,” she said.

“Do you remember the word?”

“Knackered.” She ran her finger under the word, then, looking at me recited by heart: “I get up before dawn to make sure everyone in the big house will be warm and fed when they wake, and I don’t go to sleep till they is snoring. I feel knackered half the time, like a worn-out horse. No good for nothing.”

“Word-perfect, Lizzie. How do you remember it so well?”

“I had Gareth read it to me three times till I got it. But it’s not word-perfect. I should have said ‘till they are snoring.’ Why didn’t you correct it?”

“It wasn’t my place to judge what you said or how you said it. I just wanted to record, and maybe understand.”

She nodded. “Gareth showed me every word with my name against it. I memorised where they were and what they said.”

“Why is it a good thing to have copies?” I asked.

“ ’Cos now they’ll get an airing,” she said. “You can give one to Mr. Bradley and one to the Bodleian. Anything important that’s been written down, they keep. You said that. Every book, every manuscript, every letter written from Lord Whatsit to Professor Who-knows-what.”

“And you think this is important?” I was smiling for the first time in weeks.

“I do.”

Lizzie rose and returned her copy of Women’s Words to the opened parcel in my lap. She patted it, put her hand to my cheek, then went to the kitchen.

Lizzie came with me to the Bodleian.

Since allowing me to become a reader, Mr. Nicholson had softened to the presence of women in his library, but I was not so sure about his successor. Mr. Madan looked at the title page. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Owen.” He took off his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief, as if to remove the image of my name.

“But why?”